Opinião Pública – Vol. 15, Nº 1 2009
Articles in this issue
Authors: Maria Teresa Gonzaga Alves e José Francisco Soares
In any society, individuals differ markedly in relation to their place in the social hierarchy. Those differences are deeply associated to each individual educational opportunities, occupational history, access to goods and services, social prestige and political and social options. In this paper, we assume that all those differences can be adequately described by a unique construct named SES – Socioeconomic Status. Given this, the main purposes of this paper is to discuss different forms of measuring the SES in applied social science research and to introduce a specific measure, with the appropriate interpretation, for this construct. The usefulness of the new measure is verified with the data from a longitudinal educational survey named GERES 2005 – acronym for School Generation 2005.
Authors: Lúcio Rennó, Elaine Licio e Henrique Carlos de O. Castro
This article explores the impact of being a Family Grant Program beneficiary in vote choice for President in the 2006 elections and in Lula da Silva’s government evaluations. Therefore, the article contributes to the growing literature on how social programs affect voting behaviour in Brazil. However, differently from all other studies, we use individual level data from the AmericasBarometer 2008 Brazilian round, and multivariate statistical analysis to test our hypotheses. Results indicate that being a recipient of the Family Grant Program positively affects vote for Lula and his administration’s evaluations.
Authors: Luis Felipe Miguel e Flávia Biroli
The present article discusses central hypothesis that guide a large empirical research, still under development, about the intersections of gender, media and polítical representation. Analysing the presence and acting of women in the political field and their presence in the media, in Brasil, the study aims to understand the relationships between those spheres concerning the problems related to the representation of women in politics. In the field of politics and in the media, we can find mechanisms that limit not only the presence of women but also the configurations of that presence. Thus, the article discusses how the remaining of gender stereotypes limits women's political action and its visibility in the news, in a process in which one of these terms feeds back the other.
Authors: Mario Fuks e Fabrício Mendes Fialho
This article analyzes the impact on public opinion of the strategies of communication carried out by the Legislative Chamber of Minas Gerais (ALMG) during the 1990's. We evaluate whether the public opinion on the state legislature has changed along of this thirteen years, following a steady process of institutional innovation. Comparing results for different points of time between 1993 and 2006, we reject the idea that ALMG's public image is substantially different from standard public evaluation of Brazilian political institutions. We find that the institutional change process is noticeable and has a positive response only for the small public attentive to ALMG's messages transmitted by radio and television.
Author: Angela Cristina Salgueiro Marques
The relations among communication, mass media and local democracy are analysed here from an empirical case of the Belo Horizonte’s Prefecture. In May 2003 the Prefecture started a publicity campaign entitled Who likes BH, has one’s own way to show it (Quem gosta de BH tem seu jeito de mostrar). Two distinct assumptions arise from an ideal image of political participation that guides the campaign. In one hand the campaign claims for a division of tasks among citizens that would improve the life qualityin the city. In the other hand it imposes a restriction to political participation by giving to citizens the false status of collaborators in solving colctive problems. The strategic use of mass media creates a sensation of proximity between municipal government and citizens while a real deliberation process does not take place among the inhabitants. The campaign policy discourse assigns specific actors and actions, underlining their contributions to collective good as a path to generate internal political and cultural cohesion within the city.
Author: Luiz Claudio Lourenço
This present article deals with an object of very common research in foreign literature on Communication Politics, but still less studied in Brazil: the negative ads. Currently, the main characteristic of the negative ads are the attacks between the opponents and their utilization did not represent newness on majoritary elections in Brazil, but its rhetorical study and their observation among the voters are still less studied in our country. Our contribution here is exactly to promote this type of analysis during the Brazilian presidential elections of 2002, remarkably one of the most presidential running with negative ads. This article is divided in five topics: 1 - an historical briefing about the negative ads; 2 - the factors that had contributed for the propagation of the negative ads in 2002; 3 - their repercussion on the Brazilian media (television) in that year; 4 - the rhetorical analysis of negative ad and 5 - the repercussion of negative ads among the Brazilian ordinary voter.
Author: Mônica Machado
The article evaluates the production of the speeches of electoral advertising in TV of the two presidential candidates: Fernando Henrique (PSDB) in 1998 and Luis Inácio Lula of Silva (PT) in 2006. Therefore, the point is to investigate to what extent the campaigns show discursive strategic structures - similar in the two contexts - in spite of supporting registrations and different political orientations. The methodology uses procedures to understand the rhetorical elements of each campaign and persuasion strategies. In both campaigns one observes the incentive to the retrospective vote, the speech in favor of the continuity of the administration, the place of the candidate-president's authority, the emphasis in speech of economical issues. One can suggest that the rhetoric of the reelection favors positions in the electoral dispute.
Authors: José Eisenberg e Teresa Cristina de Souza Cardoso Vale
This article presents complex systems simulation as a new method for the study the electoral behavior, assuming that social interactions are the key for each voter's decision. Insofar as public opinion polls uses information limited to the moment the interview is conducted, they cannot forecast changes overtime in each voter's choice that may be caused by interactions with the media or others voters. In contrast, the electoral simulator shows to be an interesting tool for electoral analysis because it introduces such interactions as premises. In this article, we present the theoretical model of the simulator, followed by simulations made for the 2002 and 2004 elections in Brazil.
Author: Sheyla Christine Santos Fernandes
The aim of this work is to analyse the effects of values and social prejudice on political attitudes in a psicossociological perspective. The values are analysed in four levels: materialist values, post-materialist values religious values and hedonist values; the social prejudice are analysed through the social dominance orientation; the political attitudes are studied in two dimensions: trust in political institutions and support to politicians. The research has interviewed 205 undergraduate students in João Pessoa. The results show partial relationships among those variables and social equity, the value of religiosity and post materialist values in the prediction of political attitudes.